HOLBROOK, NY -- The story went viral: A small Upstate New York brewery, working with a local college, is trying to produce a beer made from yeast salvaged from bottles found in a ship that sank off the coast of Long Island in 1886.

It turns out, there’s more to the story. It turns out, there’s already beer made with that yeast.

At Saint James Brewery in Holbrook, Long Island, owner-brewer Jamie Adams has for the past year or so been making use of yeast taken from bottles found in the wreck of the SS Oregon, which sank off Fire Island in 1886. Those beers have mixed the historic yeast with modern yeast.

Adams, who has been diving on the Oregon wreck for 20 years, plans to debut his first beer made exclusively with the more than a century old yeast at the New York State Brewers Fest March 9 at the Desmond Hotel in Albany.

“We’ve been holding off on announcing this publicly until we had the yeast working so we could make a beer exclusively with it,” Adams said. “Now it’s ready.”

So he was more than a little surprised when news outlets, starting last week, picked up the story of Serious Brewing Co. of Howe’s Cave in Schoharie County and its plan to try to brew a beer with the shipwreck yeast. Serious owner Bill Felter took calls from news media around the country and overseas about the project, which included his effort to use a biotech lab at nearby SUNY Cobleskill to culture the yeast for modern use.

On Monday afternoon, Felter took a call from Adams. The conversation was friendly, according to both sides. As a result, Felter said, Serious Brewing no longer plans to make a beer using the shipwreck yeast.

“I am personally not going to brew any beer with that yeast, out of respect for him (Adams) being a fellow New York farm brewer,” Felter said today. “I don’t want to step on their toes.”

Felter said he hopes Adams and Saint James Brewery will still allow the SUNY Cobleskill students and their instructors to keep working with the yeast. A team from the school opened a salvaged bottle and began working with the yeast last week. They hope to “clean it up” for use in a beer, and analyze its DNA to determine its origin.

“The thing is, we’ve already done that," Adams said. He did much of that work in his own brewery lab, then has a friend who is a microbiologist help finish it up.

Adams initially planned to have his lawyers send a “cease and desist” letter to both Serious Brewing and SUNY Cobleskill, asking them to stop working with the yeast from the shipwreck. After talking with Felter, he will not send the letter to the brewery. He has not yet decided what to do about SUNY Cobleskill but said he’s hoping to reach an “amicable” agreement.

SUNY Cobleskill communications director Jim Feldman said today the college is “looking into” to the issue, and had no other immediate comment. It was Feldman who sent out a news release, complete with photos from the bottle opening, to media outlets last week.

Adams said he wants the whole issue to remain friendly, especially with his fellow brewers.

His frustration, he said, stems from the time and effort he’s invested in diving the Oregon wreck, retrieving artifacts and working to make the yeast useful for brewing. He said he and a group of fellow divers have been bringing up artifacts and generally reach a mutual agreement on who takes which pieces home.

These filled beer bottles were taken from the 1886 wreck of the SS Oregon off the Long Island coast. The divers included Jamie Adams, who is making beer from yeast extracted from the bottles at his Saint James Brewery in Holbrook.

It was one member of the diving group, he said, who took one of the beer bottles to Felter. Adams said he didn’t know about that bottle.

The beers from the Oregon wreck, Adams said, were found in a part of the ship’s hold that served the First Class dining room. The beers, along with wine and other beverages, were intended to be served to passengers aboard ship.

The bottles were unlabled, and sealed with corks. The bottles whose yeast could be salvaged were found lying top down, so the corks stayed in place. Adams said he’s found at least three different strains of yeast in the bottles, meaning they might not have all come from the same brewery. At least two appear to be English ale yeasts.

The Oregon was a famous wreck in its day, Adams said. It was a large passenger ship and collided with a schooner near Fire Island on Mach 6, 1886. Among the notable facts about the ship is that famed engineer Nikola Tesla, who was working for inventor Thomas Edison’s company at the time, once repaired the ship’s engine.

The shipwreck is popular for Long Island area divers. It lies in about 140 feet of water, and parts are further submerged under 20 to 30 feet of sand. On occasion, storms or currents shift the wreck, exposing previously unexplored sections to access for divers. That’s how the section holding the beer bottles was found, Adams said.

“It’s a big part of Long Island history,” Adams said. “And so we wanted to be able to share that when we felt we could make a good quality beer from it.”